Keijo

Keijo (京城) was the Japanese-imperial name for Seoul during the colonial period, and this print belongs to the body of work in which Hakutei recorded views encountered during his travels through the Japanese empire and abroad. The image likely depicts a recognizable architectural or street view of the city — possibly a palace gateway, a market street, or a panoramic prospect framed by hills — handled in the topographical-but-personal manner Hakutei favored for travel subjects. Compositionally, his Keijo prints tend to combine a flat, frieze-like arrangement of buildings or figures with carefully observed local detail (Korean roof tiles, hanbok, signage), using flat color areas separated by a restrained keyblock rather than the dense linear network of older [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e). As a critic and editor of art journals such as Hosun, Hakutei was unusually attentive to questions of regional character, and his Korean and Chinese subjects reflect the early-twentieth-century Japanese interest in continental scenery filtered through a distinctly modern, sketch-based aesthetic.